


Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.

by feralphoenix



Series: the away game [11]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Agoraphobia, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Anxiety, Autistic Frisk, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - C-PTSD, DFAB Chara, Disabled Character, Don't copy to another site, Intersex Frisk, Nonverbal Chara, Nonverbal Frisk, Other, Plot With Porn, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Sexual Content, Spoilers - Undertale Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27399328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: An airport mix-up leaves Frisk and Asriel up a creek. Chara steps up.
Relationships: Chara & Sans, Chara/Asriel Dreemurr/Frisk, Chara/Frisk, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: the away game [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/584287
Comments: 13
Kudos: 33





	Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.

**Author's Note:**

> _(take every chance, drop every fear_ – somewhere darkness is pale white and glittering. imagine being so surrounded.)

It’s early evening when you get the call.

You’ve been staying at Suzy and Noelle’s place for five days, now; this the fifth day of a projected fortnight’s visit, perhaps longer depending on if any urgent business pops up that Frisk and Asriel must attend to before returning home. (That’s happened enough before.) Ordinarily you would be at home by yourself, despite that Frisk has been needling you to stay with friends instead, but this time they gave you an impressive set of doe eyes while Asriel called your old school friend Suzy and asked, quite without your input, if she would mind terribly were you to crash at her place for two weeks. (Your wording, not Asriel’s. His was… let’s just say _unflattering_ and leave it at that.) Suzy said that of course it would be cool with her and Noelle, they’d be happy to help take care of you, and so things were decided, again quite without your input. And so, you were parceled off to their house as part of Frisk and Asriel’s business departure without having any real say in the matter.

It actually hasn’t been all that bad, though. When your in-laws pitch in to look after you during the spells where you’re left to your own devices, they both have a bad habit of treating you like glass, and even your other older friends tend not to let you do much around their homes when you’re staying with them. Maybe in, say, Undyne and Alphys’ case this is because they’re like fifteen years older than you or something and some part of them’s still holding on to the mental picture of you as a kid they’ve got to be responsible for, but _also_ Alphys has made sex toys for Frisk on commission so she clearly sees _them_ as an adult, and so in your opinion you should be forgiven if you find that idea dubious.

Suzy is your age, though, and Noelle isn’t _that_ much older. And though you’re a bit less close to Noelle given that you mostly know her through Suzy, she’s friendly enough that this isn’t too much of a roadblock. More importantly, when you say you want to help put away dishes or vacuum or whatever instead of imposing on them 24/7 they say yeah sure and show you where stuff is or how things are done at their house. Just that in and of itself makes a _huge_ difference in being able to feel like a friend visiting instead of an outpatient on suicide watch or something.

So, as you’re allowed to do chores with them, you’ve been helping Suzy and Noelle pack various light-up lawn ornaments into their shed all afternoon. They have a truly obscene number of them for every imaginable season or holiday, apparently courtesy of Noelle’s late father—not for nothing, it seems, is Holiday their family name—and Noelle herself explained when she came back from Ebott City with a small mountain of the stuff in the bed of her pickup truck that she lends them out when people need extra. “It was Eid recently, so there were some mosques in the city that borrowed these ones,” she had said.

You have enough trouble keeping your own holidays straight between the lunar and Western calendars and only really notice Christian ones anymore because television never fucking shuts up about them, so this was news to you. Since you only ever interact with Frisk and your rabbi aside from monsters it’s not as though you have any Muslim acquaintances, but maybe you should try keeping track in the general spirit of Judeo-Islamic solidarity anyway.

The three of you are heading into the house with the last of the sunset fading behind you, Suzy and Noelle talking about what to have for dinner and the hike you have planned for tomorrow, when your phone goes off in your pocket and you nearly leap out of your skin. The girls stop and look over their shoulders at you while you fumble, but at last you steady your hands enough to see Asriel’s name on caller ID, so you wave to them to go ahead. Noelle looks at Suzy, who shrugs, and the two of them walk inside. You wait until the door has swung shut behind them, then sit on the stoop and pick up.

“Chara,” Asriel says first thing, voice strained in a way that makes something in your chest clutch with preemptive warning.

“Hello, Ree,” you tell him, curling your toes in your shoes so you can better keep your voice neutral. “Weren’t you and Frisk supposed to be flying today?”

“We, uh,” says Asriel, “we did that, we got off the plane a while ago, we’re actually still at the airport and—golly, I’m getting this so mixed up already.”

“Why don’t you take a deep breath and pick an appropriate place to start,” you suggest, and shift to find a better seat on the cement.

“Yeah, I should. God. So. Uh. They lost our luggage.”

You frown. “That’s very irresponsible of the airport staff.”

“Yeah, I mean—yeah, like, I guess mistakes happen, and we’re like insured and stuff so if our luggage _never_ comes back we’ll get compensated, and most of our important stuff is in our phone inventories so it wouldn’t be _that_ big a deal except—” Asriel takes a deep breath here. “Um. Frisk’s meds were in their luggage so we wouldn’t have to go through a whole _thing_ with security every time.”

Oh, you think dully, as your stomach drops. “Oh,” you say out loud.

“We have—Frisk and me have been talking to airport people for hours and our stuff _still_ hasn’t turned up and they say it’s gonna take a week or two to track it down, and Frisk has been on the phone with the doctor and the pharmacy and all sorts of people trying to see if they can get like a replacement prescription sent or something but because of the situation and ‘cause their drugs are so specialized _that’s_ gonna take days too, and we’ve gotta be at this fucking UN summit tonight and then the congressional convention tomorrow morning so there just isn’t _time_ for us to come back and bring something from home until this gets sorted out—”

Frisk can’t afford to be off their meds for that long. Toriel has work she won’t be able to get away from on short notice; Asgore is halfway across the country with Papyrus. Only direct family has the sort of clearance to bring heavy duty medical paraphernalia through airplane security, and the only _direct family_ available is you, Frisk and Asriel’s legal spouse. You stand up. “Book me two tickets for a flight tonight. One late enough you’ll be able to pick me up from the airport.”

Asriel goes so quiet you can hear the distant hubbub of the airport on the other end. “Are you—are you _really_ sure…”

“You called me because you have no other options, do you not?” Fuck. That was much too harsh. You take a deep breath and try again. “I’m not going to try to pretend like this won’t fuck me up, but it’s an emergency. You have two high-stress meetings you can’t possibly get out of at this point. I’m not going to let Frisk risk a _literal actual heart attack_ over them.”

Asriel breathes in on the other end. “I’m sorry,” he says, and “thank you.”

“Thank me when we’ve all gotten out the other side of this in one piece,” you joke, but he doesn’t laugh.

Fair enough, honestly.

The pickup truck is Noelle’s usual preferred way to drive—it fits her general flannel aesthetic and since she and Suzy both have outdoorsy hobbies it helps to have the large storage area—but she and Suzy also own a minivan, which there was luckily time to charge before you had to get to the airport. This is a necessity because the pickup truck only formally seats two people (the truck bed is _a_ potential seat but not a very _safe_ or _legal_ seat for highway driving), and this trip to the airport Noelle is driving four.

“I’m just sorry I can’t shortcut ya straight there,” says Sans from the seat behind yours. “Or, hell, just deliver the goods by myself. Maybe I really should start thinkin’ about travelin’ with Pap more, at least once, just so I’ve got points of reference in the case of another issue like this.”

“I don’t blame you.” Though it would be wonderful if there had been a solution that easy available to you, so you could bow out. “I’m just grateful you’re willing to escort me now.”

“I’d say it’s too bad we can’t go with too,” says Suzy, also from the back (the minivan ceiling is a little low for her head, and she’s there so she can recline her seat), “but like, Noelle and me can’t fuckin break physics whenever we feel like, we do _not_ need to make you guys pay for a bunch of extra plane tickets and an extra hotel room too.”

“Much as I love havin’ a signature party trick, I’d share with the class if I could,” says Sans. “It’s real convenient and you can pull _so_ many sick pranks with it.”

“Shh for a minute, guys,” says Noelle. “I have to watch for the next turn.”

Everyone shuts up. You hold your bag to your chest and keep your eyes forward and remind yourself to take deep breaths.

The sun has mostly set already, leaving only faint traces of blue and purple along the horizon. These are rapidly engulfed by the mountains as the car descends from Monster Town’s outskirts towards Ebott City proper. Streetlights have begun to light up on the sides of the road. You keep your eyes forward as Noelle drives. When you’re this nervous and a vehicle is moving this fast, you sometimes get carsick if you try to watch from a side window instead.

Noelle lets Sans put the radio on (some sort of classical jazz channel, you think) once she’s safely onto the highway. It’s not your preferred type of music but at least there’s less pressure for you to talk this way. You stick your hand in your bag and push your wallet and books around until you touch your phone, and pull it out to double check you have everything one more time.

“Chara, stop making yourself dizzy maybe,” Suzy says from the backseat. There is an _oh how the turntables_ joke in very easy reach, which is a) funny enough to keep you from being _too_ annoyed and b) such low-hanging fruit that Sans will instantly go for it if you say anything, so you don’t.

You are less informed on the intricacies of congenital adrenal hyperplasia than Frisk is, but you _do_ know the general gist: the enzymes in their adrenal glands are messed-up and this causes their body to heavily overproduce certain hormones. The more benign effect of this disease is their intersexuality; there are far less benign ones, though. Very high blood pressure since childhood—and all the assorted risks—are one of those.

Usually they take pills to mitigate said less benign effects. You have a generous amount of these stored in your phone. In case of emergency, though, they use injections instead, so you’ve brought a small bottle of this and fresh needles too. Liquid medication is generally banned on airplanes even when stored in one’s inventory, though, so your check-in is going to be rather more strenuous than it ordinarily would be. Joy.

And, well, you don’t know if they still have anything to check their blood pressure with or if that got lost with their luggage too, so you packed Frisk’s spare cuff because why not.

Aside from that, the same folder in your phone has all the paperwork explaining the medical necessity for all this stuff, a copy of your marriage certificate, copies of Frisk and Asriel’s recent plane tickets and the receipt for them, and a statement from the airline itself about the baggage snafu. Having this much documentation will _hopefully_ keep too much confrontation from arising at the baggage check.

The bag you’re bringing as your carryon is the one you usually bring with you when you have to leave the Ebott area—you sewed medical patches onto it to alert personnel that you’re disabled so you can ideally leave communication up to whoever’s with you if you shut down completely. You’ve never actually had to rely on them before, which is possibly more a statement about how little you like to travel than their efficacy. Anyway Frisk swears up and down you can find real people in the wild who use them too.

Between your phone in your hands and the bottom of the bag there are less important things, or at least less important than your box contents. Your pill planner with the antidepressants and birth control in each section; bottles of both with one pill in each so security can match the prescriptions if you get flagged for them. A bottle with emergency anxiolytics for if you can’t handle the crowds and flip your shit. A contingency inhaler you’re probably not going to need but feel safer bringing anyway. A stiff cloth mask with a filter in it to cover your nose and mouth, which are mandatory in airports and on planes now because of some weird artifacts of history you missed while you were dead. A couple changes of clothes. Some maxi pads in wrappers. Candy. The book you were reading and your travel copy of Kitchen. That vibrator Frisk gave you, which you’ll be using as an emergency stim instead of for its intended purpose. It’s not tappers but it’s still something. Your wallet, with change and ID and a credit card.

You fucking wish you could bring some knives.

“Seriously, Chara,” Suzy says from the backseat. Your heart rolls in your chest for just a moment. It’s deeply unpleasant. “You checked your bag like nine times before we left your house just so you could be sure you had everything. You had us all check everything with you. It’s, like, fine. You don’t gotta put yourself in cardiac arrest already.”

“Maybe not the best way to put that just now,” Noelle says from beside you.

“Oh shit, oops. Sorry, dude.”

“It’s fine.” If _anyone_ has to have a heart attack you would rather it be you than Frisk, you think, except if you did in the middle of an airport that would probably mean _humans_ giving you first aid, unless Sans could be very quick on the draw shortcutting you to Toriel or someone. Talk about an unfortunete moment.

Your eyes drift from your phone to the dashboard clock. There’s still some time before your flight departs. You’d wish this horribly tense drive could be over already, except that check-in and waiting are bound to be five million times worse.

“Do we need to do corporate icebreakers right now,” Sans says from the backseat.

Beside you Noelle snorts. You startle so much you almost get the hiccups. Suzy, by the sound of it, spittakes and chokes.

_“Sans?”_ Noelle says, her voice cracking.

“It’s awkward, sure, but I feel like it’d give this _brittle_ atmosphere the conversational calcium it needs to carry us the rest’a the drive, if you catch my…” He pauses as if considering. “My _Massachusetts Drift.”_

“Sans,” you say, starting to smile despite yourself. “Sans, you can’t mix the streams like that.”

“Ehh, I admit, that one _was_ a little weak as far as car puns go. But I betcha I can think up some better ones, I read enough car mags doin’ research to find Pap somethin’ real good. Just lemme _switch gears.”_ In the rearview mirror you can see him making little finger guns at you to complement his shit eating grin and can’t help but laugh.

“If you continue down this _lane,”_ Suzy says, “I’m gonna have no choice but to queue up Noelle’s super sekret playlist of She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy covers. That’s the only thing I can think of that’d be more obnoxious.”

_“You are absolutely not doing that,”_ Noelle says, extra loud and extra high-pitched. “Corporate icebreakers are better. Please let’s do that.”

“Fine by me,” says Sans. “So, if you guys were all obscure kindsa pasta, what kinda pasta would you each be. And no repeats. If somebody else picks yours first you gotta choose somethin’ else.”

“Bow tie,” Suzy says instantly.

“Damn,” you and Noelle say almost in unison, and then you break into weak giggles.

You’re so glad you’re not facing this drive alone.

There is no fucking mercy in the surface world, however, and so the airport does at last arrive. Fuck.

Noelle drives the minivan up to the curb in front of the airport, pulling off a perfect parallel park amidst a slew of other vehicles disgorging passengers: Cars and buses, a trolley tram on a higher level that people have to walk down stairs and past you from. Surrounded by so much pavement and cement, the acoustics are utter ass, and the cacophony of many voices overlapping feels like your head being buried in palm-sized river stones. It’s already hard to breathe. For a moment you stand between the open door and the interior of Noelle’s car, holding your bag to your chest and staring down at your shoes.

Suzy pulls you away from there, but wraps you up close to her body instead. Noelle and Sans form a wall between you and the shifting crowd of humans. You close your eyes and try to pretend them all out of existence.

Suzy is big like Asriel but they’re built so so differently. His muscle is all buried under fat but Suzy has this picturesque buff butch build; there’s nothing soft about her but her demeanor. Even her base body temperature is different, and of course the texture of her skin as she’s not covered in fur. This makes it difficult to be very escapist right now. Noelle’s hand (soft, except for her nails, which are tough like the hooves on her feet) sits on your back and Sans’ (small, bony, uncomfortable as fuck) rests on your upper arm.

The sooner you leave your friends, the sooner you can get through airport security, and the sooner you can sit down and try not to panic instead of having to _function_ while trying not to panic.

You are never going to use a public airport again as long as you live.

“If anybody gives you shit take down their names and then give the names to me,” Suzy says gruffly, squeezing your shoulders. “I will hunt them down and eat their faces. Teach them to terrorize their customers.”

“I guess I’ll have to go along too to make sure my _foolhardy wife’s bravado_ doesn’t white knight her straight into jail for murder,” Noelle jokes.

You have no idea whether you actually feel better or worse about this. “Maybe just be ready to come help us take care of the house when we’re back, since I’m sure you’ll have to bring my shattered fragments back home in a dustpan to reassemble. Frisk too maybe, and Asriel sounded about ready to come back on a stretcher as well. If you thought I was useless before, well, you’re about to get a real eye-opener.”

“Cut it out with the morbid crap,” Suzy says. “It’s going to fucking suck shit for a while but you’re gonna be fine.”

“For some definition of fine.”

“And we will be here,” she goes on like she didn’t even hear you, “when you get back. So go get ‘em. Go save the day.”

“Huzzah,” you say as weakly and sarcastically as you can.

“I’ll see ‘em there safe,” Sans says, and takes a firm hold of your arm to relentlessly drag you away.

You watch Noelle and Suzy while he does. They put an arm around each other and keep their eyes on you until Sans hauls you around to face the doors so you won’t walk straight into them.

You’ve been through airports before, when you were little. Your father’s family was across the country, in the southwest, not quite all the way to America’s other major mountain range but close enough. It’s not as though he was constantly flying you out but you went enough times to have a solid idea of what airports are.

You also used an airport a very few times as a young teenager in a brand new world for Dreemurr business, before your bad brains became worse and you swore off unnecessary travel as a general rule. Even now as an adult, you don’t think you’re ever going to be over the culture shock.

Just like on your teenage visits, you’re greeted immediately by large colorful signs in the atrium telling everyone to put on their masks or face shields to help prevent the spread of infectious disease. You get yours (blue and white plaid) out of your bag, and Sans takes his (black with a neon blue fang pattern) out of his phone—as far as you’re aware monsters are actually exempt from the mask thing because so few diseases affect both monsters and humans, so maybe he’s just wearing one now to avoid any potential issues because he can pass for human from a distance.

Roped-off lines to ticket checkins like they have at banks and the post office are still a thing, but here in the airport the snaking pathway is marked by large colorful dots on the floor where groups of people are supposed to stand, just a bit out of arm’s length of one another. You and Sans snake through the first two rows of rope to stand on the dot behind three people in business suits with large suitcases. A few minutes later a parent and very young child come to fill the spot behind you. It’s not _as_ bad as it would be if you were actually all packed in close, but you still have to close your eyes and breathe.

_“Mommy,”_ the kid behind you says in a stage whisper, giggling. “Mommy, that guy is a _skellington.”_

“Hush,” says the mother. “And don’t point, it’s rude.”

Next to you Sans turns around to grin at the kid and give them a wave. They screech out some overjoyed giggles and you wince a little on the inside at the sharp pain in your ear. At least Sans is handling this kid a lot better than he initially handled Frisk, once upon a time.

The line _crawls._ Sans has gone from entertaining the kid behind you to chatting with their mother, bully for him; you can’t even listen in for something to do because the noise of all your fellow line-waiters’ conversations turn everything into mush. Occasionally a voice amplified over the weird-ass too-clear future loudspeakers cuts over the babble to call whoever’s first in line to a clerk, and you at least get to inch closer to freedom. But that’s the only break you get in the pelagic, mindless pressure of the crowd. You’ve had to wear a face mask before—a medical-grade one, not just the cloth-with-a-coffee-filter-inside kind—and so you know yours isn’t to blame for the can’t-get-enough-air swimming sensation that dizzies you and steals all steadiness from your legs.

The businesspeople in front of you turn the last bend in the line, and the wall of noise opens up before you to become something more like a wave pushing you forward instead. Sans’ hand pats at your elbow brief and steadying—so he _is_ paying attention after all, still.

Five spots left, before it’s your turn and you can escape this awful room. Four spots. Three spots. Two. By the time you’re finally standing on the last floor dot your knees ache from locking them to stay upright.

“I’m ready to help the next group,” calls one of the check-in clerks.

“Bye mister skellington,” says the little kid behind you. Sans waves to them with one hand and propels you forward with the other. You’re grateful for the support, as you’re vibrating so badly you think you might collapse otherwise.

Sans takes over the conversation with the clerk too, flashing your tickets and making small talk so all you have to do is silently present your ID and demonstrate that your bag fits within the dimensions of the carryon sizing box.

“Your plane is currently scheduled to arrive at terminal 18C, which is all the way on the left once you’re through carryon check,” says the clerk. “You can follow the overhead signs there. But be sure to look at the arrival/departure displays, as that’s subject to unscheduled changes.”

Even a hundred years into the future that’s still a problem. You’d crack a joke about that if you weren’t ninety percent of your way to fainting already.

“Thanks,” Sans says, and pinches your sleeve. “C’mon, we oughta have a shorter line at the next check-in, and then you’ll get to sit down.”

Forget _sitting_ down, you already want to _lay facedown on a bed for six hours to decompress._ By which you mean _your_ bed, which you’re not going to get to see for at least two days.

Maybe Suzy’s reaction will at least be funny when she finds out how extensively you weren’t exaggerating, when you said your goodbyes to her and Noelle. That thought in mind, you let Sans pull you across the room and left into a broad arch-ceilinged hallway. Its walls are lined with advertisement posters in between bathrooms, drinking fountains, and the occasional fire extinguisher or defibrillator in a wall case.

This hall is still filled with people, but they’re walking to their destinations instead of standing still and are less clustered up, so the Impending Syncope Meter on your imaginary HUD slowly creeps back down into the eighty percent range. Some of them go down flights of stairs or escalators towards the baggage claim; others, possibly here to see friends or family off instead of to fly or unburdened by large luggage the way you are, simply walk past you and Sans towards the doors.

“C’mon,” Sans says again, and leads you up a flight of stairs and left down a hallway whose walls are covered in artwork made from colored fluorescent lights. The effect is a little like classic cyberpunk as you knew it but with a heavy dose of 20th century art that keeps it looking friendly instead of harsh and oppressive. It is at this hallway’s end that a number of security guards stand by gates with computers to check one’s personal information yet again. The lines—there are three of them—are again longer than you personally enjoy them being, but this time they are straight instead of folded in on themselves as well as being about eight feet apart horizontally. This puts you further out of melee range of other humans than previous and it means the aforementioned Fainting Warning meter stays at around eighty instead of spiking again. Huzzah.

“Hey,” says a deep voice from behind you in line. Your entire body locks up, your meter rockets to about a ninety-eight, you are assailed by the intense fear that you are about to vomit and you break out in a cold sweat all over. Beside you Sans swivels around. “Yeah! Yeah, you with the teeth. Haven’t I seen you at some MTT comedy show?”

“Shucks, pal,” says Sans. “That prob’ly was me. Nice of ya to remember.”

“I owe you one for helping my boyfriend finally stop whining and love stupid wordplay,” the guy behind you goes on. You unclench your right hand from your bag and attempt to discreetly massage your chest over your heart in an attempt to bring your pulse back down. “Hope you do another show sometime, ‘cause the last time I was there you were _fantastic.”_

Sans laughs. “Well, if nothing else, I got a skele- _ton_ of skele- _puns,_ so I’ve still got plenty ‘a material if I do get another call from everybody’s favorite sexy robot. Sometimes there’s perks to your sense of humor bein’ your best redeeming quality.”

Says the guy with a whole wall’s worth of fancy math and science degrees, you think. If you weren’t in an airport surrounded by human strangers and whoever Sans is talking to was someone you’d at least seen a few times before, you would cut in to say so—Sans of all people shouldn’t sell himself _short_ despite his compact stature.

However, you _are_ in an airport surrounded by human strangers and you don’t fucking know Sans’ gushing fan, so you keep your mouth damn well shut rather than keel over.

The line moves forward. Your knees wobble but you think of Frisk and stay up.

Eventually you make it to the guard, who bids you stand in a walled-off portion of the room. This is the part you hate most, the part where your blood screams for you to run; in any sort of fair world you could exempt yourself from this with your aid patch, but quelle surprise, a hundred years into the future homo sapiens still ought to go by homo bastardus instead. Shaking and white-knuckled you step into the room and remove your mask. Stale-smelling sour air laced with some sort of antiviral, antibiotic disinfectant puffs over you in clouds. The guard peers at your face to compare it to your ticket and ID, and after way too long a moment for your taste they wave you back out. You hook your mask back over your ears, collect your effects, and lean against the wall still shaking until Sans is allowed through too.

“Think I need to find a bathroom,” you tell him when he sidles up, as your insides are sloshing ominously.

“I see a sign up ahead,” Sans says, patting your arm. “Lemme steer, I’ll getcha there.”

It transpires that modern airport bathrooms have a nice little console in the stalls with which you can indicate that cleaning staff should come give them a look if you’ve thrown up in one, which is quite handy. It’s been so long since you’ve had cause to take a piss or a shit in a 2100s airport that you’ve completely forgotten if they had that feature before; perhaps you simply didn’t notice them when you were a preteen.

In addition to this handy feature there’s a little coin-turn dispenser by the sink where you can purchase single-wrapped maxi pads, tampons, condoms, small water bottles, or one-use mouthwash for fifty cents. You wash your hands thoroughly and buy one water bottle and mouthwash each so that you can stop tasting bile after you’ve rinsed your mouth out; you drink the rest of the water for good measure and push the bottle into the recycling bin beside the trash. Big ups to the conveniences of living in the future.

“Y’all right now?” Sans asks when you emerge from the bathroom.

“That’s a very stupid question,” you tell him.

“Fair,” he says. “C’mon, let’s get your bag checked and let you sit down.”

Back to the merciless grind it is, then. You follow Sans as he ambles down the broad hallways of the airport and morosely regard potted plants and modern art and animated advertisements, think bitterly that if your childhood fantasies of scourging humanity from this poor planet had borne fruit you wouldn’t have to be going through this right now. You cannot quite drum up enough humor or energy for it, but now would be a nicely opportune moment to snap a selfie, plaster it with fire emoji stickers, and send it to someone to inquire if this is that Christian Hell you keep hearing about, Terezi Homestuck-like. But Frisk is the only person who might get even half the joke and they’re probably in as much of a mood for joshing as you are—which is to say not at all.

There are three more lengthy snaking lines headed for metal detectors and those enormous conveyor belt x-ray contraptions that scan carry-on bags, but instead of appending yourselves to one of them you and Sans find an airport security member loitering alongside. Predictably you freeze up, so it’s Sans who waves his ticket about and says, “We’re s’posed ta go through special check-in for vital medical supplies. Where’s that at?”

“We do need better signs for it,” says the security person amiably, shrugging. “I’ll show you where to go.”

The room at the end of the corridor spills beyond the corridor’s bounds, so that tucked behind the corner of the wall there’s a diagonal path towards a fourth, less-populated metal detector and bag scanner. There is virtually no line at this one, but the tradeoff is an enhanced security presence, so overall it is not any easier on your crippling anthrophobia. Fucking awesome.

“I can get you two started,” says a guard with long curly hair, bleached a frosty yellow for the most part but an earthy gold at the roots. “Do both of you need medical supplies hand-checked or just one?”

Sans makes Will Smith hands at you—you’d be proud of his execution if you didn’t feel so bone-deep sick—and you unfasten one hand from your bag to raise it timidly.

“Have you got the supplies stored in your bag or your phone?” asks the guard. Mutely you get out your phone and hold it up in answer. “Okay, then show me your inventory and your papers. Once we’re done with that we’ll run your bag through the x-ray machine and have you go through our metal detector.”

Either they have correctly interpreted the patches on your bag—this _is_ the line for medical supplies, that’s a reasonable assumption to make—or they’ve intuited from your face that you’re more or less nonverbal from anxiety. Their tone is gentle and careful. You’re used to airport security personnel being bored rent-a-cops; it’s almost perturbing to be treated so kindly by one. You will super take it though.

It takes a somewhat shameful amount of inept fumbling to actually deploy all the relevant papers from your inventory: Your fingers shake like you have developed a palsy and you keep opening the wrong folders. Atop this you take the papers out in the wrong order entirely: First the ticket copies and receipt, then Frisk’s doctor’s note, then the explanation of your partners’ lost luggage, and only then your marriage certificate. The shit cherry on the garbage sundae is that you promptly forget which order these were actually supposed to be in, and in attempting to shuffle them into something nice and explanatory you become so confused that you drop everything all over the floor.

“Deep breath,” says Sans. You glare at him as hysterically as possible. He just grins at you from behind his mask. “No, seriously. Breathe in… hold it… breathe out. Slow and easy.”

“I’ll help get these,” says the guard, and swoops down before you’re even finished with Sans’ _breathe out_ to collect everything. They present the papers to you while straightening up. Several are turned upside down and the degree to which they’re mixed is a strong argument for _should’ve paperclipped these, dingus!_ but you at least manage to get each document set grouped properly again. With the four groups held slightly separated, you hand them back over, and hope the guard can glean the situation without your having to fill in any extra information.

It takes a while. This you despise as a matter of course, but you _have_ to let the guard read through everything; you would have to even if you could speak to explain yourself. All these documents are here to prove you’re telling the truth, so this guard wouldn’t be doing their job if they weren’t looking carefully. Chara’s Rational Brain is doing a very poor job of convincing The Fear™ of this, though. You want to be out of here Now. You want to be getting off the damn plane so you can deliver Frisk’s things to them, already, and will at least be able to be safe and with your partners until Sans shows up to bring you back.

“Okay,” the guard says at last. They hand you most of the papers back but keep holding on to the one with Frisk’s prescriptions on it. “I’m going to use this—” they shake it gently— “to double-check the actual medication, so would you let me see your inventory app?”

You open it and hand your phone over.

“This isn’t one I’ve seen before,” the guard comments, flicking through with a fingertip. “Very easy to navigate though. What program is this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“My, ah,” you manage, voice faint and quavering, “a family friend made it. All our devices run bespoke software. The OS too.”

“Impressive,” says the guard. “I should warn you, I’ve heard somebody’s trying to mandate what inventory programs and such are allowed so they can take your phone and do automatic scans for flagged material. There’s a lot of pushback still because it would screw over anyone who has to use proprietary for work or would rather use homebrew for security—not everyone can afford a second phone just for travel purposes. Hope they don’t actually go through with it, but better to have the heads up, yeah?”

You nod. Alphys is going to have to hear about this; since Sans is here listening you can expect that she will, though. Handy if you end up too traumatized from this trip to retain much of it.

“Anyway, you’re all clear,” the guard goes on, and hands your phone back to you with a smile. “Put your bag, shoes, and any removable assistive devices in a bin to go through the scanner; take off any metal you’re wearing and put it in one of the little bowls that looks like a cat food dish; then you can go through the metal detector and you’re all done.”

You return the last of the papers to your inventory, shut your phone off, and cram it back into your bag. Fucking finally. You have been at the very end of your rope since getting Asriel’s call and both your metaphorical _and_ physical palms are getting real fucking sweaty.

Sans has already got the proffered bin and bowl ready for you, which is nice of him. It is a little bit silly that you _still_ have to take your shoes off Even Now In The Future because of something that happened literally years before you were even born, but no one’s asked your opinion on the matter and you doubt you’d be able to speak if anyone actually had.

Taking off your locket and wedding ring at any time is a weird sensation—you never really remove either unless you have to—but being without the familiar weight of the one and the smooth pressure of the other even for a few minutes in a place like this is, let’s say, _not your favorite._ It is only balefully that you set them along with your shoes and bag and a wrist brace on the conveyor belt into the scanner, and with the knowledge that you will be getting them back the sooner you get this over with.

You step into the little open-ended box and put your hands out next to you as the interior instructions indicate. There’s a beep, and someone outside says “You’re all clear!” so out you go.

“See, that wasn’t so bad,” Sans says while you cram your feet back into your shoes instead of bothering with undoing and redoing the laces. “Now you can sit for a while and we can shop at the little tourist trap dealies ‘til it’s time to fly.”

_I have already thrown up once today and may yet do so again,_ you sign at him, grinding your heel in an attempt to straighten out the back of your shoe without having to stretch your foot behind you to pick at it.

“That’s still _only_ once,” Sans says. You can’t see his full expression behind his mask but you would bet good dollars that it is a shit-eating grin. “You’re doin’ pretty good so far, kiddo.”

The shoe is not cooperating, and you can’t remember the one-handed sign for _fuck you,_ so you merely flip him off while digging the fingers of your other hand between your heel and your shoe and fumbling around. Sans snorts.

You are halfway across the airport to gate C18 before you think to stop Sans and check one of the brightly lit ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES displays to find that actually your plane is now scheduled to arrive at B12 instead, which is fully on the other end of the building.

“Can’t believe it’s been a hundred years and they’re still having this problem,” you say under your breath.

“More of a clusterfuck than a room fulla Tsunderplanes,” Sans concurs, and you laugh despite yourself. “Listen, you good to sit by yourself when we get to the right gate? ‘Cuz I ain’t kiddin about the shopping. You can follow along and keep track ‘a time if you don’t wanna hang out alone.”

You consider this. “Let’s see what the gate is like first. I want to sit but if it’s very crowded I think I’d rather follow you.”

“Good plan,” says Sans. This settled, you mosey.

It conspires that while there are more seats filled than not at gate B12, certainly more than you would like there to be, most of those against the window have not been claimed. You make your perch at the very end of the row, nearest the door in the wall itself, and put your bag on the empty seat next to you, one arm through the straps for good measure.

“Nice,” says Sans. “Text me if you need anythin’.” And he slouches off, back to the broad main central pathway of the airport’s trailing arm. He doesn’t shortcut—maybe he’s not even able to without a doorway, you’re still not a hundred percent clear on how his physics-breaking powers actually work. You can see him occasionally between the gaps in passengers walking to and fro, and then he’s around the corner and out of view.

You pull your book out of your bag and hold it in your hands idly, considering; at some length you return it to its place. No, with all the noise you highly doubt you’ll be able to give it your full concentration. You don’t need to get jumpscared by someone approaching or miss any important announcements or whatever, either.

Instead you take your phone out and open the shitty games apps. Where exactly Alphys got copies of old 1990s computer games like Pipe Dream to bundle with her homebrew phone OS you don’t know, but they’re good for something lowkey to do with your hands and your brain that still leave you with some basic awareness of your surroundings.

You’ve got a nice good streak on composing metal pathways for green slime when someone who is extremely not Sans approaches and your fingers fumble, costing you the game.

Gripping your phone hard enough you’d probably break the screen if it were made of glass and not a weird goofy futuristic material whose name you can’t pronounce, you regard the interloper from the corner of your eye. They’re human, of course. Shorter than you, you believe, though it’s harder to judge when they’re standing and you’re sitting. Skin’s a red-brown sun-warmed brick color, wild ringlets are a darker red. Rufous albinism, probably, though a glimpse at green eyes unusual for a Black American might mean they’re mixed like you instead of albino. They have a bulky duffel bag slung over one shoulder and are wearing what looks like a track jersey of some sort, with FREEDMAN in block letters across the upper back above a large 03.

This Mx Freedman gives you two quick glances and then—your hackles are up around your ears but you try to keep that as locked down as you can—plunks the duffel bag down in the seat next to the one your bag occupies, and sits three chairs away from you. Instead of playing with a phone or reading a book they turn to watch the outside with one arm slung over the chair back, jiggling a foot and not facing you at all.

You breathe out as surreptitiously as you’re able. If this stranger had sat literally one chair closer you wouldn’t have been able to handle it, but this is _just_ enough distance you’ll be able to escape a meltdown.

Even so, it’s difficult to concentrate on timed games with a human sitting so close. Attempting to restart Pipe Dream you can’t make it past more than a few levels. And on particularly strategy-heavy games like Minesweeper you shame yourself by getting distracted and clicking mines over and over. Solitaire is _technically_ timed in the sense that your point total will go down the longer you take, but you can redo moves if you realize four or five cards later your last play was stupid, so this is where you ultimately retreat.

Finally Sans returns. He has his mask pulled down to chomp exaggeratedly on a corndog, a paper bag stamped with a soft pretzel logo in the crook of one arm, and looped over the other what appears to be assorted candy and some Sudoku books.

“Souvenir for the little bro,” he says of the books when you lift your bag from the seat beside you and he sits down. “You want any of this?” he then says, shaking soft pretzels and bag-obscured candy at you.

“I just threw up maybe half an hour ago and, as previously stated, can make no guarantees that this will not happen again over the course of the flight,” you point out to him. Then consider the baleful grumbling of your insides and calculate the likelihood of not fainting over the course of the flight if you dodge every opportunity to eat between now and getting away from this rank overabundance of human scourge. “What flavor or flavors are the pretzels.”

“Two salt and butter, two cinnamon sugar,” Sans says through a bite of corndog, which is gross and also unpersuasive.

“Hand ‘em over,” you say anyway, reaching out to clasp and unclasp your fingers in a claw on empty air. Sans grins wider and does that. “I’ll give you the rest back. Also, you have corndog in your teeth. Please do something about that.”

At this he rolls his eyes and hands you the now-empty corndog stick to get some floss out of his phone. There’s a trash can just a little out of arm’s reach of you and little postal box shaped recycling bins past that; as the stick is not paper, plastic, aluminum, or glass, you heft it like a little javelin towards the trash can. It actually goes in, too; nice.

Here you work one of the cinnamon pretzels halfway out of its bag with your thumbs and pull your mask down under your chin to take a bite. It is warm and sweet and perfect, even the bits where it’s gotten oversized salt or butter on it from its proximity to different-flavored pretzels in the bag, which would have bothered you if said different-flavored pretzels were not salt and butter but something less friendly to mix with cinnamon sugar. You make your way quietly through both sweet pretzels and one of the salty ones before handing the bag back to Sans, and would have eaten the fourth as well were you not worried about Future Chara suffering from Present Chara’s shortsighted need for sustenance. Not today, hubris.

You have barely dusted your hands off on your pants and pulled your mask back up when airport staff calls out for boarding class A to get in line at the signs and for any disabled passengers to gather at the door, thereby flooding your system with adrenaline and also fear. Maybe today after all, hubris. “That means us,” Sans says helpfully beside you, and you have zero idea what he is talking about until he points even more helpfully at the patches on your bag and at the line at the bottom of your printed-out ticket proclaiming you eligible for early boarding. Oh.

So up you stagger, Sans having to half-support you, and the both of you join a line of people on crutches and in wheelchairs and one with an oxygen tank and a parent with a baby, plus assorted friends and/or family members. Everyone else’s disabilities being extremely visible, you cannot help but feel out of place as fuck, but as yet no one seems to be giving you the stink eye. You’ll take it.

Many of these people requiring extra help from staff to get boarded, you wait around and tremble for a ghastly timeless expanse that’s probably more like fifteen minutes. After this someone checks your and Sans’ tickets and politely lets you into the horrible little hallway suspended over thin air, and you remember how little you like heights that don’t have magical safety nets underneath them. Tripping on a vine like an asshole and plunging headfirst into a great honking hole before one has made one’s final resolve to die does that sometimes. Very inexplicable. (This is sarcasm.)

But the horrible little hallway ends quicker than the line wait, and you and Sans are on a plane, motherfucker. Still rather more claustrophobic than you like but 211x planes are less hideously cramped than the ones when you were a kid and your brain isn’t screaming at you that you are about to fall three stories and shatter your spine so, again, you’ll take it.

You’re able to pick your own seats for this flight and there’s no first-class section (are those even still a thing? You have zero clue) so you take your place in a window seat on the plane’s left side, near enough to the front you’ll be able to disembark quickly upon landing but not _so_ near you’re right on top of the flight attendants and cockpit. Sans takes his seat beside you, a semi-heroic skeleton buffer between you and whoever might take the third seat in the row.

It occurs to you that if not for your early seating qualification you and Sans would be in the final boarding group and therefore might not even have been able to sit next to each other at all, Asriel having booked these tickets only hours ago. What a nightmare!

Presently more people begin to board the plane. With Sans as a buffer between you and them, you focus on buckling your seatbelt and resolutely don’t peek.

“Hey man, this seat open?” says somebody, though, and you feel all your veins and arteries go icy cold.

You look from the corner of your eye: It’s the same Mx Freedman who sat near you at the gate. The only small blessing here is that they’re addressing Sans instead of you.

“Uh,” says Sans. “Yeah, I guess?”

You don’t suppose you can truly blame him for this because you don’t know how many people will be riding this plane and neither of you have any real authority to dictate what other passengers do, but you’re still super screaming on the inside while the intruding human says “Nice” and loads their bag into the overhead bin.

“Imma be honest with you,” says Mx Freedman as they sit, neglecting their seatbelt as yet, “I’m like—doing this ‘cause I recognize you guys? This flight’s s’posed to be pretty full and I don’t want you to have to deal with somebody who’s gonna wanna chitchat with _both_ of you the whole time.”

“Didn’t realize I was that infamous,” says Sans. “Usually it’s my bro who gets the adoring fans in public places.” This, you think, is rich of someone who got approached by a fan within the past hour, but you keep this to yourself.

“No, like,” Mx Freedman goes on. “I met Chara just once when we were kids. I don’t think they’d remember ‘cause it was like—a whole lot, but I’m never gonna forget it. So I know they ain’t the biggest fan of homo sapiens, and like, _whole mood, unpasteurized._ Least I can do to repay ‘em for back then to install myself as a second meat shield, yanno?”

_What?_ You turn your head so you can better stare at the intruding human as even Sans is too dumbfounded for a response. Their looks are so striking you feel certain you would remember having met them before, even half your life ago, even if you were distracted at the time, even now their is mouth covered with a black cloth mask, but you absolutely don’t know their face.

They wink and give you a thumbs up. Ah. There’s—there’s _something_ about that, something that tugs at your memory. Maybe if your attention weren’t shattered by the amount of adrenaline in your blood you could focus on that, chase it down to discover its origins, but as things are right now you absolutely haven’t any hope.

“Oh—it’s Rufus, by the way,” says the human. “And I use he. Since I like, already know all y’all’s names and pronouns and stuff.”

“Cool name,” says Sans, offering his hand to this Rufus Freedman to shake.

Rufus grasps it. “Thanks, man. I picked it out myself.”

There’s a pleasant _ping_ noise from above you all, and you look up to see that the fasten seatbelts sign has turned on above you. Airplanes look and feel a lot more sophisticated now than they did when you were little, but many of their fundamentals are the same, for which you’re very glad right now.

Along with the fasten seatbelts sign, a voice comes over the intercom—so much clearer than those do in your childhood memories—to announce the plane will be queueing for takeoff and repeating that everyone’s seatbelts need to go on, listing the flights this plane will be doing today—still one more left after this, hopefully the flight crew has had a break because that sounds rather taxing to one’s stamina—and thanking you the passengers for choosing to fly with them, et cetera.

You fasten your seatbelt with shaking hands and fumble in your bag for your panic pills and water. This flight’s going to last around two hours, which is about the amount of time when these have their strongest effect, so if you’re going to take one at all it might as well be now. You only barely don’t do an Asriel and spill the contents of your refilled-to-the-brim water bottle all over yourself.

Returning your things to your bag, you rest it on your lap and clench both hands on it. As the plane rolls out to the long runway Sans would-be-casually flops his left hand onto the back of your right. You release your bag with that hand only and hold the proffered hand tight. Sans wraps his bony fingers around yours and you worry your thumb over his knuckle.

Beside you Sans and Rufus are chitchatting in quiet voices. You watch out the window as the airport grounds roll by. The medicine has begun to kick in, giving everything the slightly surreal veneer of a particularly lucid dream; the dim lighting of early night makes it feel especially like being inside a dark aquarium.

The plane speeds up and inertia pulls you gently against the back of your seat. It tilts back and then the scenery outside the window drops away and begins to shrink to the size of tiny miniatures like showoffy needlepoint art. This doesn’t agitate your well-earned dislike of falling as the plane’s floor is quite firm and steady underneath you, but it—it’s dizzying, especially with the disorientation from your meds. It’s a little bit _tipsy_ and a little more _bad trip_ and a nice reminder why you’ve come to hate mind-altering substances even besides the bias your father’s love of alcohol instilled in you as a child. Between trauma and your prescriptions your brain’s fucked up enough already without pickling it in anything else, thanks.

Further up you go, past the scant cloud cover. Out the window there are little pinpricks of light, and occasionally a lake or river will flash red-gold like a paint spill and sear your eyes, but aside from that the world’s soaked in this overwhelming periwinkle-tinged blue that stretches in every direction. Time gels. Unnatural calm clings at your body mingled with dizziness. Through your jeans you can’t really feel the seat under you, so it falls to your hand on the window and Sans’ fingers through yours to keep you steady.

The sound of air rushing around the plane is much quieter here in the future, more like the volume of air resistance around a car. So you catch little fragments of conversation between Sans and Rufus when your attention wends toward them.

“—don’t want like a repeat of any a’ that Caster Semenya shit when it’s the two thousand one hundred and _thirtieth_ fuckin goddamn year on the jesus calendar, and may I just say that she got done dirty AF and I will die mad about it,” Rufus is saying animatedly. “It’s annoying enough when they try and gatekeep _me_ out of shit but oooh they start pullin they white cis ass garbage on my _wife_ and we finna raise some real hell.”

“Nice,” says Sans back. “I ain’t gonna _fibula_ here, it’s more my bro that’s into the sportsballs than me—I know enough to like, pretend I can’t play hockey to bully his big jock BFF. But you hear a little when you’re always bumping elbows with politicians and the sportsball wank du jour is like, infringing on basic human gender rights and shit. So I can put words in floppy fuzzy ears if you want support from monstrous places.”

“Shit yes I do,” says Rufus. “Thanks for bein’ a pal.”

“You said you’re gonna be meeting your gal at the next stop…?”

“Stop after this one actually, I gotta switch flights. Fuckin _hate_ taking a bajillion planes in one day ‘cause if there ain’t any good conversation it’s _boring! as!!! hell_ but ain’t nothin’ we could do about that today ‘cos Innig’s either got rehearsals or performances all day and can’t fly out. Now we got magic on the surface again I wish somebody’d like, invent some cool scifi anime-ass magitech that’d let you rocket across the country you own self through rings or some shit like a Sonic stage or a Kirby minigame. Again, it’s _2130,_ why isn’t Wipeout real yet. Why ain’t Rainbow Road real yet either. You know what I’m sayin???”

“Uhhhh vaguely enough that I can say I feel ya? What’s Wipeout.”

“Racing game,” says Rufus. “Been around for like a century. I got the original 1990s version on my phone that I can run without internet and show ya, it’s real dope.”

Sans leans away from you to regard the phone but doesn’t release your hand. You list your head against the plane wall and watch the little touch screen on the back of the seat in front of you cycling through advertisements for movies you can watch or games you can play for a small (read: deeply overpriced) fee. Thoughts treacly from your meds you muse on how funny it is that this stranger cares so much about video games people today would see as historical classics. Maybe if you didn’t have to shut your brain down, and if you could remember where you apparently know him from, you could join in on the conversation, since they were old but still contemporary for you, comparatively speaking.

In a situation like this where you have no idea how he knows you, though? _No thank you._

The window is cold. Your breath steams against it softly and obscures the view—not that you can see much but clouds with an occasional peek at the microscopic ground. Your bag rests heavy on your lap but you’re shaking slightly. No idea whether it’s the temperature, your medication, or the basic anxiety of existing on a packed plane. Sans’ thumb presses into the back of your hand, a firm point of discomfort against your own bones. You’re glad of it.

“Chara,” Sans says, and you gasp a little and come back to yourself.

“What?”

“You want anything to drink? Flight attendant’s here askin’.”

You blank out for a long moment—too long. “Um. Tea?”

“Y’all got decaf tea?” Sans asks, which was _not_ what you said, but is probably for the best considering how poisoned by adrenaline you’ve been all day now.

They do have decaf tea. It’s some off-brand British morning tea blend and bagged so it’s watery and hideous and tastes like paper but it is at least warm, so you hold the cup (recycled, recyclable wax paper) in your left hand and sip and stare at screen commercials until you’re so visually overstimulated you have to shut your eyes.

Your sense of time is, by now, hopelessly shot. It simultaneously feels as though you’ve been sitting here for only five minutes but also five hours, like floating in a tank. The inside of your mouth still tastes like bad tea, the back of your throat slightly dry no matter how many times you swallow. That and Sans’ hand in yours are the only real things.

“We are approaching our destination now,” says somebody over the speakers. If you had any tea left you’d spill it all over yourself jumping in shock, but thankfully you do not. “Please fasten your seat belts as we begin our descent. Flight attendants will be along shortly to collect any garbage.”

You never took your seat belt _off,_ so there’s that, but you’re jittering and your heart’s jackhammering and god _damn_ you do not like either of those sensations while your meds have turned your whole brain to gelatin.

Sans shifts away from Rufus to sit straight up in his seat, and reaches his free hand over to pat your wrist. “We’re almost there, buddy,” he says, squeezing your hand until your fingers go yellowish white on either side of his. You’ll probably have bone-shaped indents on your hand for a while: At least there’ll be something for you to laugh about as the safety comes off your brain and flings you back into the abject panic dimension. “You just gotta hang in there a little longer.”

“Sans,” you manage with your voice a gross croak—at least your tone’s mostly even with a couple warbles instead of coming out shrill— “if you even _attempt_ to tell me to ‘stay determined’ I am going to flip my entire shit at you.”

He just chuckles at you. “Good ta know your funny bone’s still working, kid.”

The attendant arrives a moment later, and Sans has to prize the crumpled tea cup from your hand, which is a much less dignified affair. He doesn’t laugh at you and neither does Rufus, who is suddenly very busy putting away his phone, so you decide you’ll take it as you turn back towards the window.

The view is momentarily obscured in cloud, and then you’re forced to squint against teeming lights from red to green strewn out across the ground like dew in a spiderweb. At first they’re packed together so closely it’s hard to differentiate them from each other, like the clumps of tiny beads on some of Frisk’s fancier clothing or the stitches in your more ambitious needlepoint creations when you were still experimenting with that. As the plane descends the lights separate—painful on your eyes, but also allowing you to identify individual buildings, roads, and cars. That sensation like floating in an aquarium returns—or maybe the pet fish aisle of a pet shop, with the overhead lights off and only the individual tank lights on.

Then the plane keeps getting lower and lower, to the point where you flinch every time you pass over a tall building in case the bottom might scrape its roof. Probably time to find something else to look at.

But after staring out the window into the dark the screen in front of you just hurts your head to look at, so you close your eyes and make an attempt at long steady breaths instead. The floaty feeling has begun to fade and in its place emotion wells up in you like angry snakes. You tighten your fist on your bag and squeeze at Sans’ hand as hard as you dare.

There’s a hideous jolt that makes you squeak and open your eyes in a panic, but the trees whipping past and the momentum that presses you into the back of your seat mean it’s just touchdown. Thank fuck.

Even so, by the time the plane actually stops you’re basically vibrating in your seat again. As the wise ones of the internet once said: You can’t fucking take it. Seriously you’re at your limit.

“You may now remove your seatbelts,” the chipper voice of some flight attendant says. You peel your fingers from your bag and undo yours with gusto. “We have arrived at our destination. Thank you for choosing our airline.”

On Sans’ other side Rufus rockets up out of his seat—faster, as far as you’re willing to look around and see, than most of the other passengers. He steps out into the aisle to retrieve his bag from the overhead bin, and then stands there, bouncing in place so his hair moves like little springs.

“C’mon, kiddo,” Sans says, lurching to his feet with your hand still in his grip. “Let’s get outta here.”

He leads you into the aisle—Rufus stays there until you’re up as if to stem the tide of other passengers, despite his impatient bouncing—and together you walk the length of the plane back out its doors and into the hideous corridor. By now your panic pills have started to wear off proper and while the relief from the lucid-dreaming underwater feelings is welcome, you would’ve been cool if that waited for another few minutes.

The airport you’ve landed at is furnished quite differently from the last, with broad skylights in the ceiling and analog work from local artists on its walls in between gates. It has also got a metric asston of humans milling about, so you find it difficult to be enthused. At least you’re not so packed in as you were in the plane.

“Well,” says Rufus—you startle; you were so overwhelmed you almost forgot he was still here— “Imma head to my next flight. Seeya ‘round sometime, probably.”

“Later,” Sans says, but Rufus is already halfway across the room, waving broadly. Then the crowd shifts and he’s out of sight altogether.

_Ree and Frisk are supposed to be waiting by the main exit past the baggage claim,_ you remind Sans. _Let’s hurry up and get out of here._

“I gotcha,” he says, and offers a hand—his right this time, perhaps to give _your_ right hand a break. “You can just look at the floor. I can prob’ly get us there with all the helpful signs around.”

_Yet again I put myself in your hands,_ you say. This is normally where you’d add a joke to gently rag on him, but your brain’s not coming up with any good ones and honestly Sans hasn’t actually done that bad a job thus far. So you just stick your hand in his and let him tow you.

This trip takes you down a long stretch of hallway—which you mostly do not see because you’re looking at the carpet and Sans’ heels—then around a corner into another hallway—second verse, same as the first—then down an escalator—hopefully any hypothetical peanut gallery does not expect a break in the pattern, as it’s served you well twice already. You get jostled a couple times whenever there’s a large crowd and predictably fucking hate it. Also it’s rather noisy: Some of this is acoustics alone in portions of the airport that are both tiled and possess (from your scant glances up) vaulted ceilings. You kind of want to complain about this to someone but have no illusions that the entire airport will actually refurnish large portions of its interiors just to suit the needs of a few passengers likely to become overstimulated and therefore overwhelmed. Plus, as a zoomer—even a temporally displaced one—there’s no way in fuck you’re gonna act like a total Karen here.

“Just another turn here,” Sans says, and leads you around a bend. In the corner of your eye you can see baggage carousels surrounded by people who brought more than just carryons: You and he pass these by, and you dare to raise your chin a little just in time to see a familiar hulking Boss Monster standing near the doors, with a human alongside.

Sans gets you about halfway across the room before you drop his hand entirely and run to them.

The sound of your footsteps grab their attention and they turn to you with identical looks of surprise on their faces—well, you can only see Frisk’s eyes over their face mask, but that’s still enough for you to be able to guess at the rest of their expression. Asriel says “Chara?” at not-quite-shout volume just a few seconds before you plow directly into the two of them. Frisk’s human arms and one of Asriel’s, strong and broad, hold you up; you’re glad for this because you doubt your legs alone would be able to support you properly after all this tension.

“Special delivery,” Sans says from behind you, and you do not doubt at all that he is probably wearing an even more shit-eating grin than he usually does.

“It’s so good to see both of you right now,” Asriel says, which is a lot more dignified than actually responding to Sans’ cliché one-liner. Then he sniffles: Less dignified to be sure, but quintessentially Asriel “Ree” Dreemurr and therefore deeply comforting right now. “Like—you’ve really saved our butts here. And… we missed you.”

“I gotta get back home,” Sans says, “but, uh, lemme know over phone or text or whatever when you need me to come back an’ pick Chara up.”

“Of course,” says Asriel. You don’t turn to look—you already know that by the time you do Sans will already have teleported away.

Coming down off your panic meds costs you on the ride to Frisk and Asriel’s hotel room: It’s not so much that you get _carsick_ as that looking out _any_ car window or even sitting upright makes you incredibly dizzy. Asriel has to have the limo (apparently he and Frisk travel by these despite the ostentatiousness because most taxis don’t have enough space for him and anyway it’s potluck whether cab drivers are cool with monsters) pull over briefly so you can lay down with your head in Frisk’s lap and rearrange your seatbelt accordingly.

“This sucks ass,” you say into their thigh. They laugh at you and run careful fingers over your hair.

“This would be kind of hot if you weren’t feeling so bad,” Asriel says from the seat perpendicular to yours, and Frisk cackles.

You would kick him here but you don’t dare sit up to find the best angle to do that. _“Someone’s_ apparently forgetting I don’t like risking public attention as much as he does. This car has a _driver._ That wall is not soundproof. _You are loud.”_

“I’m not suggesting we actually _do_ anything, _especially_ right now when you’re so overwhelmed and we gotta hurry! I’m just _saying.”_

“OK, that’s enough,” Frisk interjects. “Speaking of the driver and the situation, even this conversation can probably wait until we’re actually at the hotel.”

“Hear, hear,” you concur, flopping one hand and closing your eyes against Frisk’s thigh. They smell like airport and perfume about to wear off, neither of which you can call yourself a fan, but they’re warm and they’re soft. As Papyrus once said, they’re meeting all your standards.

Asriel sighs all theatrical and self-suffering but there’s a note of forcedness to it too. You won’t push him on it because, like, same. “Oh, all _right,_ if you guys insist.”

The limo falls silent but for the car’s inner mechanisms humming around and beneath you. For your part you keep your eyes closed: Frisk’s fingers still thread through your hair, and that’s enough for now.

As soon as the three of you are alone in the hotel suite you hand your phone off to Frisk and stagger towards the bed, crawl up on top of it fully clothed and stretch out.

“Oh, Chara,” Asriel says from somewhere behind and to the left of you. “I’m so sorry.”

You close your eyes and grunt. “Someone had to. If you’re that concerned come to bed. All I want to do is sleep. Should be easier if you’re with me.”

“Hang on,” Asriel says. “I need to help Frisk with their shot first and then I’ve got to change, but I’ll be there afterwards. You sure you don’t want to change into pajamas too?”

You grunt again.

“At least take your shoes off,” says Frisk’s voice all tired but reasonable. You don’t move, so they sigh and a few moments later you feel their hands on your calves while they pull one, then the other of your shoes off to drop to the carpet with muted thuds.

Even medicated, and even as exhausted as you are, the echoes of wariness forbid you from sleep—knowledge that this is an unfamiliar place and that there are so many unknown humans haunting its rooms and halls, only the locked door keeping them away from you. But some five or ten minutes later the mattress bends beneath Asriel’s familiar weight, and he murmurs to alert you before he pulls you soft up to the pillows with him, levers you into his arms so your forehead presses to the fur of his chest and your cheek settles against his bicep. Frisk follows after, soft arms around your waist and the chaste press of lips to the crown of your head.

The bed is quite generous, if not as palatial as the one back home; still they encase you like the proverbial sardines in a tin. Love and trust gang up on anthrophobia and mete out swift victory; you relax into the two pairs of arms in which you’re safely caught. Asriel and Frisk will protect you.

This certainty allows you, at last, to switch the lights off in your brain.

Compared to the airport and the flight itself, which remain agonizingly stark in your head down to the smells of every individual room through the fabric of your mask, the hotel stay is a fat blur in your memory. In a video chat with your therapist some time after the dust has settled for good, the simile you’ll come up with is that of a car in winter that’s been left outside and snowed upon. If you were to sit in the car and attempt to look out the windows there might be a few serendipitous breaks in the snow built upon them where you could glimpse the outside world, but otherwise all you could manage to see should be perhaps a vague impression of light.

So, there are a few tiny snatches of crystalline memory within the aforementioned fat blur. You do not remember discussing the plan with your partners at all, but you _do_ remember texting Suzy that Frisk’s doctor had decreed they should come home immediately for a check-in and so they would be headed back with you, that after one day alone in the house to decompress the two of you wanted to impose upon Suzy and Noelle’s company. If you go back through your message history you can find Suzy’s _yeah ofc thatll be fine_ but you don’t remember actually getting it.

The bathroom of the hotel suite stands out clearer in your mind than the room where you spent a lot of your time sleeping or on the phone: It was furnished in such white you risked hurting your eyes if you went in there with all the lights on. You remember dropping your travel shampoo on the shower floor and the way the soap bubbles swirled between your feet when you bent to pick it up. You remember Frisk showing you the little digital kiosk for ordering room service but you don’t remember actually using it, though you know you must have, you’ve got the receipt. Nor do you remember where the table in the suite was or what it looked like.

They had some sort of millefeuille crepe breakfast confection that was cannoli flavored. It was surprisingly good. You had it with some sort of ridiculous fancy coffee in a blue and white mug piled high with whipped cream and hot chocolate sauce. There was cinnamon biscotti. You remember it was all fantastic, and you remember stretching out on the bed on your side to read and check your messages from Frisk and Asriel, leaving the used dishes in the room instead of taking them outside and paging a hotel worker to pick them up. Asriel had sighed a little but done it for you without further complaint when he got back in.

On the whole things are clearer at the very tail end of your stay—which was about two or three days all told, and feels like a month though you can only remember a few hours of it total.

“I just wish I could go home with you,” Asriel had said, as the three of you departed the hotel. “But it’s going to be a bit before the workload’s thin enough I can hand literally everything off to Dad.”

_Yeah, we’re lucky enough as it is that Papyrus can swoop in to take over for me,_ Frisk added. They looked even more tired than you, which says a lot. _But at least when you DO come home we’ll all have time for a nice long break._

Asriel scrubbed his great big hands over his face and wrinkled up his muzzle, then shook his head so his ears flopped. One got caught on the collar of his fancy robes, and you reached up to fix it for him, rolling it between your fingertips a little before letting go to soak up his softness. “Honestly _fuck_ politics, for our anniversary this year I’m making sure our schedule is good and clear and that lots of people will be ready to step in so we’ll be able to have a proper vacation, just us three. Goodness knows we’ve earned it.”

_Knock on wood,_ you said, and then reached out towards the wall paneling to do exactly that.

This exchange was followed by another limo ride, filled with the three of you conversing solely in eyebrows, giggles, and gently kicking one another in the ankles like middle schoolers. And that limo ride brings you to here and now, outside the airport.

Sans loiters by the doors with his usual enormous grin and a truly hideous pair of aviator shades mismatched with cutesy cartoon Yorkie-patterned baggy pants and one of those ugly-on-purpose knitted sweaters Toriel keeps giving him. He keeps trying to ambush her with them at inopportune moments to get her to laugh, so you suspect this is his idea of keeping the ambiance low-key. He needn’t have bothered really, since being spared the same ordeal means you’re significantly less tense, but it’s sweet of him to be considerate, you guess.

Asriel gets out of the limo first and holds the door for you and Frisk. Once you’re all out on the sidewalk, Sans sauntering towards you at a snail’s pace, Asriel looks at you and Frisk for a long helpless moment then sweeps you both into his arms at once. He holds you hard, and he’s shaking just a little. You close your eyes against his body heat and hug him one-armed, fingers loose on the back of his robe, the other hand flat on his chest, fingertips just brushing his locket. He’s soft, and the way his body can truly shut out the rest of the world if only for a moment is one of the few real perks of his ridiculous height.

“This sucks,” he says. “Call me when you know what the doctor says. I swear I’ll be home with you as soon as I can.”

“I’m sorry you can’t come back with us,” you say. Beside you in his arms Frisk shifts to hold you as well as him. “We’ll keep you up to date. I’ll make sure Frisk rests—well, I think for a while Suzy and Noelle will be making sure both of us rest. But I’ll take care of them after that.”

“Swoon,” Frisk says out loud. You giggle. Asriel laughs thickly.

“That’s about as much as I can ask for,” he says. He loosens his hold on you to press a kiss into your hair, then one into Frisk’s. “I love you guys, okay?”

“I love you too,” you tell him, and raise yourself up on tiptoe with his clothes for purchase to kiss him on the chin. “Get out there. Do the politics. Kick _all_ the asses. Take _all_ the names.”

“Stop memeing at me,” Asriel says, and gently pushes you towards Sans while Frisk laughs. “I’ll call later.”

“A’right,” Sans says. “Guess I gotta be the one to break up all the touchy feelies, else we’re gonna be standin’ around here all day.” And, to Asriel: “Say hey to my bro for me, willya?”

“Yeah. I will.”

Sans holds out both his arms—it takes you a beat to realize he’s offering them to you and Frisk and not shrugging. “Well, Chara, you’re the one with the red shoes. Guess you gotta do the honors.”

“What—oh.” You can’t help but laugh, now; while your friend and your partners look on, you shift your weight so you can rise up on the balls of your feet and sarcastically tap your heels together. “There’s no place like home.”

“And now we just cha cha real smooth,” Sans says, and tows you through the automatic doors all the way back to Massachusetts.

“I’m in the bath,” Frisk calls when you slump down atop the bed with a sigh. And then: “You can join me if you want.”

You take a good long moment to lie on your back and consider the merits of not moving vs salving your loneliness and still-recovering nerves with closeness. The latter wins out. With some effort you sit up, peel your shirt off, and wriggle out of your jeans and boxers. You consider your taped-flat tits for a moment and then shrug to yourself; it’s not like you’ve had this set of tape on for enough days you really _need_ to change it, and your hackles haven’t lain quite flat enough yet that it doesn’t feel like life-saving armor. It’s _also_ not as though you _need_ to change the tape for the sake of your ribs, the way you would with a binder. So it can stay on for now.

Frisk, when you walk into the bathroom, is leaned back against the edge of the hot tub, slumped down so it’s just their head and shoulders above the water, and also occasionally little islands of the tops of their breasts too. The sole sound in the room is the low burble of the bathtub jets, and the dimmer switch is turned down to a level that’s gentle on both your eyes while still allowing you to see.

They still look tired, and that hurts. There’s so little that you can actually do to help Frisk, to help Ree, when you really get down to it. Even running yourself ragged to deliver Frisk’s meds this time—what little your resolve was able to buy you, on the scales of your house spouse lifestyle without the home upkeep versus their demanding political careers, you know the worry you caused them ate most of your gains.

Your limits are one sheer fucking cliff you have no desire to cast yourself down from. But it’s not possible for you not to wish you could do more, seeing the dark circles under Frisk’s eyes and the little threads of white through their hair. They take on a lot, and you’re not in a position to share their burdens the way you did when you were kids. Like, that’s probably better for both of you in the long run, because the zero boundaries situation largely sucked, but having less ability to support them isn’t your favorite tradeoff.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Frisk says.

“I hate Brenda,” you reply automatically, “and a bad guy hit me in the shin and I peed all over my pants.”

Frisk cracks up, leaning their head back and even lifting their hands out of the water to pass over their face. “Now I’m going to have that stupid seagull song stuck in my head all night, you awful memelord.”

“I’m not sure what else I was supposed to do when you gave me that opening line word for word,” you say, grinning back at them. “It is basically an automatic script at this point in time.”

“Okay, let’s try again then,” Frisk says, still half laughing. They let their arms sink back beneath the water. “What were you thinking about while you were looking at me very intently and not saying anything.”

You consider how to answer this. “A lot that if someone had asked me ten years ago which of the three of us would be first to go gray, I probably would have bet on myself, not you.”

“Oh,” Frisk says.

“Also that I wish there was more I could do from here.”

“You helped me avoid a heart attack,” they say. “Even though you had a bad time doing it. If that’s not a big help I don’t know what is.”

“Still can’t help but wish I could do more. Also that this hadn’t wrecked my shit so bad, not least so that Asriel wouldn’t look so sad about it all the time.”

“I think,” says Frisk, “that all three of us have spent too much time feeling sad and guilty about a situation literally none of us caused, and pickling in it isn’t going to help anybody here. You could join me in the bath instead maybe.”

“You’re right on multiple counts there,” you say, and so step in beside them, one leg then the other. It’s very warm, _almost_ too hot but not quite, and you sit very slowly to give yourself time to adjust. Tight gooseflesh crawls up your bare skin before it submerges, and you shiver. Your joints ache and then ease in the heat.

Frisk waits for a moment and then leans into you, their soft upper arm pressed against yours, the side of their head against your temple.

“I’m glad we handled that okay,” they say all soft.

“Yeah,” you say, and swallow. Close your eyes to better soak up the sensation of skin on skin, of their weight gentle up against your body. “I’m glad we’re—well. I’m glad we’re on the mend.”

Frisk hums low in their chest and lists a little more of their weight into you. You press back, flex your toes against the ticklish flow of one of the jets. There you sit, together, for a moment that’s _almost_ tense the way it stretches out.

Belatedly Frisk sets one palm on your thigh: Light and idle, a question.

You take a pause to think about it but also there’s already a lazy crawl of interest rousing your clit, peaking your nipples beneath the gauze pads that protect them from the tape. So you turn your head to kiss their face in response: Forehead, temple, cheek. They tilt their own head to catch your mouth, and you reach out automatically to cup their face in your hand, playing wet fingers through their hair.

After everything you’re still too worn out to quite tap into the raging desperation of your usual contact-starved lust: Like, you’re horny, but you want Frisk’s hands on you as much for comfort as to come. So when you get up and shift around to straddle their lap—this is kind of a chore trying not to take most of the bathwater with you actually—you simply guide their hands to rest on your waist while you return to kissing them.

With some effort you leave their mouth behind to press your lips into their hair. Frisk nibbles at the base of your throat so you hiss.

“I want to keep you safe,” you tell them all low and hoarse, embarrassingly close to tears. “You are just so brave and so strong and so kind and it goes all the way through me like lightning when dumb shit like this happens and you get hurt. And I’m hilariously bad at taking care of even my own body, and I know it’d be a disservice to your courage and your resolve to take you away from a fight that means so much to all of us. But I love you. Whenever you come home exhausted it makes me crazy. There’s a part of me that’s still a fighty ten-year-old and wants to butcher everybody that makes you move like you’re twice your age.”

“Chara,” Frisk says into your clavicle. Their chin grazes at the top of your breastbone and they cut themself off to lay soft kisses there. “You have no idea how much difference it makes just that you’re on our side.”

“I do, actually,” you tell them, “because I know how much it means to _me_ that you and Ree understand and accept why I hate humanity. And I’m glad I can do that for you. But I still want to do _more._ Wish there was some easy bad guy I could take down to solve everything, or at least make your and Ree’s jobs a lot easier.”

“But this isn’t that kind of story,” Frisk says.

“No. It’s not.” If it were, you likely wouldn’t be here in this mostly-happy if still imperfect ending. That’s knowledge that hangs bittersweet over the moment.

Frisk smiles into your chest and their hands slide from your waist down over your ass and back up your thighs. “Also you shouldn’t talk about political assassination plots in front of a diplomat. Got to preserve your plausible deniability.”

This startles a laugh out of you. You’re still laughing when their right hand softly cups your lips, and you nearly choke on a gasp when they flick their thumb over your clit.

Even without looking down at them you can feel Frisk shift against your chest, sense their eyes on your face as they gauge your reactions. It’s a little intense to bear, so instead you sink your upper body down against them, spread your legs further apart so you rest lower against them, nudge them so they sit up enough for you to rest your forehead on their shoulder without submerging your face. You shiver through them petting you and sink your fingers into the soft of their sides and belly, kiss the tops of their tits. Drag your hand down through their pubes to stroke their clit between two fingers, wait for them to start making quiet sounds of appreciation and impatience, then turn your wrist so you can sink two fingers into their pussy.

Frisk sighs and presses their hand down harder against you, and you—you make the kind of high helpless sound that only they and Asriel are allowed to hear out of you. Their breath rushing and your pulse fluttering in your ears are all you can hear besides the jets burbling, camouflaging the waves your movements make.

You slide your fingers in a knuckle deeper, and Frisk laughs breathless as they clutch on you wet and silken.

You’re first to fall apart. The orgasm isn’t so earth-shakingly perfect, but it’s the comfort you wanted, the waves of relaxation through all your nerves, the sigh released from trapped deep in your lungs. Gently you lay a hand on Frisk’s arm to let them know you’ve had enough.

It takes maybe four, five more minutes for them to come too—you keep working patiently, watching from the corner of your eye as their face scrunches and their smile unspools. In the end they grip the lip of the tub and their muscles go tense beneath you and they say your name, once, all tense and quiet. Your heart sways, the easy fall and rise of releasing a burden, and you raise your arms from the water to balance yourself on the tile past the lip, still perched over them.

There you both stay until it occurs to you the water’s begun to smell like salt and sweat. “Fuck, we’re going to need a shower after this bath, aren’t we.”

Frisk laughs. “We don’t have to go to Suzy’s until tomorrow. I won’t tell if you won’t.”

The punchline is thus: The suitcases do not arrive until more than a month after Asriel has returned on his break.

“Apparently they got loaded onto the next plane over,” he says when he gets off the phone with the airline, “which went to Nevada and then Texas, and our stuff’s been languishing at the lost and found there all this time because someone thought they’d sent an email to the other airports that plane was at but actually didn’t.”

“Still _incredible_ to me that we’re still having these problems a hundred years in the future,” you offer, “but then I do suppose that we’ll be dealing with _human_ error for as long as homo sapiens are a part of the equation.”

“They’re giving us a pretty big discount on our next purchase of tickets as an apology for the inconvenience, at least.”

You make a face. “No offense to them, but as I highly doubt _I’ll_ be using their services again anytime soon (if ever), let them know they can make their personal apology to _me_ out in Door Dash credits for airport junk food instead.”

_Did they have anything that good there?_ Frisk wants to know.

“I am informed by way of Sans that they had dippin dots, of which I have not partaken in a heinous amount of time,” you tell them. “Also their soft pretzels were good, and I expect they will be a lot better if I’m not worrying whether I’ll be able to keep them down. Tell the nice airline people that I wish to partake.”

“I don’t know if they _can_ do that,” Asriel hedges, “but I’ll convey the request.”

_If they can’t do it we can just sell our tickets to someone else who wants them,_ Frisk suggests, _and I can use the money to buy one of those rotisserie ovens they use to bake soft pretzels so we can have them at home whenever._

“This is also acceptable,” you say, and that’s that.


End file.
